Re: Can you learn computer science from a school?

Raffael Cavallaro <raffaelcavallaro@pas-d'espam-s'il-vous-plait-mac.com>
wrote:

On 2007-05-17 10:49:13 -0400, wrf3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bob Felts) said:


I'd say that the laws of physics and they way they impact hardware
design are a pretty heavy constraint on algorithm design.

How so? Classical computers are just turing machines; they don't care
about the algorithm being run.

Because at the end of the day for an algorithm to be useful,

Why is that the primary measure for algorithms? A lot of math isn't
"useful" (so I'm told, my field was engineering, so I didn't get to
study a lot of the esoteric stuff).

it has to run on a real machine with real data, and real machines and data
have specific characteristics of access times to and sizes of different
levels of memory, time to recompute a value rather than caching it, error
tolerances, ability to inerpolate or extrapolate from previous
computations, size of the data set, idiosyncratic characteristics of the
common data set, network latency, etc. and these real world
characteristics will influence how you design your algorithm.

Not if I'm interested in the theoretical characteristics of the
algorithm. Computer science, like math, doesn't _have_ to be practical.
.

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